Thursday, September 22, 2011

In a week I’ve read two HQN’s books that I have truly connected with me. First I had the pleasure of reading Sarah Mayberry’s The Best Laid Plans and Donna Alward’s How a Cowboy Stole Her Heart. To say I loved both would be an understatement.
Sarah Mayberry’s The Best Laid Plans is a contemporary story with a twist. You have the successful woman lawyer, Alexander Knight, and I will admit all women secretly what to hate these women who seem to juggle it all, but Alex isn’t juggling things well at all. Introduce sexy co-worker Ethan Stone and immediately you think sparks are going to fly off the page. They don’t. Oh, don’t get me wrong they certainly do later on but that’s the buildup, or should I say foreplay that was so real in this book. Alex’s dilemma is her biological clock is ticking loudly and she desperately wants a baby, which is the last thing Ethan wants, or is it? They work well together and are great friends but can these two educated overachievers get over themselves to get what they both really want – yes! I loved the emotional play with this story and felt like I wanted to kill both Alex and Ethan at one point for trying to best plot out how to conceive with the use of medical intervention. Bless you Mayberry for allowing the characters to find themselves and their own weaknesses so they could come together and go at baby-making the old fashion way. This truly was a page turner and I read it in two sittings. Sarah Mayberry books can be found at http://www.sarahmayberry.com.
Donna Alward’s How A Cowboy Stole Her Heart captured me from page one. Talk about building strong characters. I immediately loved Megan Briggs, who is a strong willed woman who has suffered her share of medical problems including breast cancer. Now, I know what you’re thinking here—how can a romance about a breast cancer survivor be sexy? Well, read this book because not only does Alward touch on the physical limitations Megan has to overcome like rediscovering her own body but she has to allow herself to love. Clay Gregory doesn’t want to deal with death, especially the word “cancer” which took his father’s life and caused his mother to abandoned him, but he quickly discovers he can’t live without Megan. They start out as friends and I think that’s why I connected with this book. The characters were believable, honest about their wants and desires and fears, and they still struggled to believe in each other. I read this book in one night and couldn’t put it down! By the end I felt like Megan was my friend and Clay was the brother I wanted to throttle. LOL Check out her website at: http://www.donnaalward.com for more on Alward and her books.